


Hit Snooze at 11:58:20 pm

by Jonaira



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Justice League - All Media Types
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Corruption, Dark, Dystopia, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Jason Todd Deserves Better, Past Tim Drake/Jason Todd, Technology, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Tim Drake Needs a Hug, Tim Drake-centric, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:07:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24493246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jonaira/pseuds/Jonaira
Summary: "It's a goddamn AI, it's supposed to do exactly what I tell it to !""Aaaand that's exactly the kind of attitude that'll get you locked out of your own protocols. Good day Mr. Waçkiev. Don't bother with your application for the AI." Tim ended the call.Some folk solve the New York Times Saturday crossword. Tim solves Everything else.
Relationships: Tim Drake & Bruce Wayne, Tim Drake & Damian Wayne, Tim Drake & Dick Grayson & Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne & Damian Wayne, Tim Drake & Jason Todd
Comments: 4
Kudos: 65





	Hit Snooze at 11:58:20 pm

**Author's Note:**

> JayTim if you squint. 
> 
> Hope all of you are safe !

"This is the smartest, most powerful AI coded on the market so far and you're guaranteeing it'll never let us down ?"

"I'm saying, It will never leave until you make it _want_ to." 

"What the hell is that even supposed to mean ?!" The big, red faced man demanded shrilly through the speakers.

"It means, the J.A.S.O.N won't betray you unless you betray it first."

" _ Betray _ ?! It's a goddamn AI, it's supposed to do exactly what I tell it to !"

"Aaaand that's exactly the kind of attitude that'll get you locked out of your own protocols. Good day Mr. Waçkiev. Don't bother with your application for the AI." Tim ended the call.

* * *

"Tim," Bruce tells him gently as he takes him aside a week after the avalanche of applications to own the fifty million dollar AI have poured in. Every single one had been manually rejected by Bruce himself. "We can't use this."

Tim blinked. "Of course we can. Jason would never betray  _ us _ ."

Bruce shook his head. "You aren't understanding, Tim. We can't market, sell and charge so exorbitantly for a system that will lock it's owner out if it doesn't like a command it's asked to execute."

Tim reeled back as if those soft, carefully spoken words were a slap. "No,  _ you _ don't understand. Jason would never let us down like that. Of course he'd not double cross anyone running him except if they breached his Doomsday protocols or if they were using him to try and attack us, B."

"You called it He."

"What ?" Tim was nonplussed.

"The AI," Dick says warily from his corner. "You called it  _ He _ ."

Tim ignored him. "Why can't we market this Bruce ?" He crossed his arms.

Bruce was scrutinizing him, looking increasingly worried. "Tim, your creation is beautiful. A masterpiece of all current intelligence tech."

Tim preened. 

"So why are you so insistent on _selling_ it ? Why can't you keep it for your own personal use, or upload it to the Batcomputer ?"

Tim pushed his hair back with a frustrated laugh. "Just think how much more useful Jason would be to us running the internal networks of some of the richest, most powerful men and women in the world. How much data it could collect and process. How many conspiracies and crimes it could nip in the bud, or report to us or _anyone_ who could stop it, really. "

"But-"

"He needs to be  _ free _ Bruce !" Tim exploded, knocking his chair over. "Robin needs to fly again, Red Hood needs to take down crime rings and Jason can't do that sitting on my systems, spinning his wheels on the barest trickle of data I can feed him. He'd starve !"

Tim didn't like the way Bruce was looking at him one bit. The usually impassive gaze looked so...  _ pitying _ . So compassionate.

"I'm sorry Tim. WayneTech is officially withdrawing the sale of the J.A.S.O.N AI."

Tim stops hearing Bruce speaking after that, catching none of Bruce talking about apologies and press releases and irredeemable product defects and refunds to all those who had transferred money so far.

He leaves Bruce's office.

Only to have Bruce, (and Dick and Damian) storm into his own 43 hours later.

Bruce was livid. "Why is the Thomas and Martha Wayne Foundation Trust one billion richer with money that has been traced from  _ Black Mask _ and the  _ Penguin's _ shell companies ?"

Tim spun around in his chair happily. "You missed the two billion to the Bowery Education, Vocation and Rehabilitation program, and the billion to the Gotham Narrows Orphanage. I think that last one was Luthor, actually." he mused.

"You sold the most powerful AI on earth to the worst  _ criminals _ on earth ?" Bruce's voice shook.

"It's perfect !"Tim clapped. "I actually need to thank you for declining WayneTech's official marketing of Jason." His chair creaked as he leaned back and kicked his legs up onto the desk. "This works so much better. Just imagine, Jason running the system of all of the worst people in the world. They'll be finished in a matter of weeks." Tim laughed quietly. "It's exactly how he would have done things."

Tim's spinning was stopped by Bruce's hand holding the chair, practically nose to nose with Tim. The wheels groaned their protest. 

"He's gone, Tim. You can't bring him back. None of us can." Bruce's face looked more lined, more exhausted, more pained and older than Tim had seen in months. Ever since the funeral with an empty casket, because they'd had no large enough pieces of a body to bury.

Tim was distantly, dimly aware of Damian mouthing off about insanity and Dick trying his best to get him to stop. He tuned it out effortlessly. Tim had honed this talent to perfection in the past few weeks. He wondered how he'd ever been ruffled by the ravings of the Demon Brat in the past.

"B, you don't need to worry." Tim said quietly, swinging himself out of the chair. "His Doomsday protocols are still in place, just tweaked by me to fly more under the radar so as to not raise suspicion in the unsavoury characters using him. Jason won't allow for the hurting or killing of any innocents. He has overrides and decoy protocols built in to keep his cover intact. He can report a shipment of human cargo as received even as they're rerouted, intercepted and picked up by local law enforcement after an anonymous tip. He can stop a terrorist plane hijacking mid air and pilot the plane to the nearest military base. He can stop a heist in a Swiss bank, and have the thieves locked up safe in the very vault they tried to steal until police pick them up. He can stop a robbery in the candy store down the street, have cops on the scene in minutes."

Tim turned around to look at Bruce, who had sat down on the bed, ashen faced. "He can make us redundant. He can be all of us, all the time, everywhere. He can save  _ everyone _ ."

"But not himself." Bruce whispered hollowly. 

Tim shrugged, flippant. "Seemed fitting too. That's the way he died the second time over, getting those people away from the Joker's bombs. Too late to save himself. Blown up. History chasing its own tail in circles."

Like Tim said, it was a matter of weeks before Gotham was brought to her knees by the power vacuum that followed in the wake of her dirtiest sons being dethroned. Cobblepot and Roman Sionis lead the fray into prison, with 255 years and 464 years apiece, no bail, and every last man and woman on their payroll named openly. Batman and his birds, Oracle and  _ her _ Birds of Prey are all hands on deck for a while, handling the petty crime that breaks out in the absence of the bigger sharks. New faces crawl out of the woodwork but are sent scrambling by the Bats that swoop in.

The Joker is saved for last. Nobody knows how or who breaks into the highest security cell in Arkham, but the corpse is found blown up and stuck through with a piece of rebar from the ceiling of the destroyed room. They put it down to an electrical fire and structural collapse.

The celebrations in Gotham last for a week straight.

* * *

But like a stone thrown in a murky pond, the ripples spread outwards, faster and faster. Across the country, similar happenings are taking place - cartels, crime syndicates, kingpins being bowled over. The Court of Owls come seeking prey, only to start getting dismantled from top to the bottom, its Talons lost and thrown into disarray without their handlers.

Batman and Robin find Talia al Ghul on a rooftop, the League of Assassins crippled as all the pies they had their fingers in go bad. She tells them that the League is going underground, back to its roots. To a time before it became a major dabbler in tech systems of every kind. She was there to say goodbye.

The press comes sniffing at the gates of Wayne Enterprises, quoting a money trail that allegedly runs from overseas holding in the names of the fallen criminals to every Wayne Foundation backed charity in the city. Multiple smaller increment sums had been withdrawn from those shell companies, but they match the total amounts that had been deposited in the Gotham charities. There are allegations of WE using their charities to siphon donated money free from tax cuts.

Brucie Wayne smiles blandly at Vicki Vale as he brushes off her accusations. "Isn't it great ! We can't help who decides to try boosting their good karma with a little donation here or there, but rest assured, WE would  _ never _ skim off the charities under its umbrella. Altruism and Business shouldn't be mixed, no ?" The room is lit up with flashes, a thousand shutters clicking like pincers trying to catch a lie in Bruce's cold plastic smile. It's the most serious the press had seen him in a while as he reached the end of his statement. 

All investigations carried out on the allegations against Wayne Tech fall apart with no evidence to support any corruption charges. WE stock punches through the roof.

And still, the purge spreads. The Justice League scrambles to apprehend criminals who are suddenly out in the open with nowhere to run to. 

The unseen angel of destruction sweeps the world. Shadow governments are revealed and pulled up at the roots. There is blood in the streets, and Superman shoots around the world stopping private jets leaving the country with their disgraced passengers.

And yet, no investigating team, or think tank or review panel can pinpoint what exactly had been this catalyst, unable to find any common link.

Nobody but a single boy in the world knew that as soon as J.A.S.O.N had calibrated a hundred percent success of dismantling an operation, an empire of rot, it would execute its final protocols and scrub itself from the system without a trace.

The darkweb lights up with hackers putting forward a theory of a digital takedown. A ghost protocol. But enacted by who, or  _ what _ ?

There are whisperings of an AI system that had hit the market a few months before, first under the aegis of WayneTech, but pulled quietly and quickly within a matter of hours. They say the system had nonetheless made its way into the black market and GitHub soliloquies are written about the sheer power of the system. Connections are drawn between buyers and their subsequent downfall, but not a single trace of the AI can be found, even to those who had attempted reverse engineering it's code from snippets they had copied. Upon opening their windows to revisit those bits and pieces, all they find is an 8-bit image of a tombstone. It's gone, off personal devices, from offline repositories. Like it had never existed in the first place.

People took to the streets world over, protesting how so many and such integral parts of their governments had been run by such scum, for so many decades undetected. The UN is in tatters, the court in the Hague swamped with cases brandishing irrefutable evidence of corruption, conspiracy and human rights violations. The left wing media is foaming at the mouth. There is chaos, and anarchy and nobody trusts anyone in power anymore.

International espionage grinds to a standstill and the releases and captures of active field agents of multiple governments, planted in multiple foreign governments are all leveraged against the others.

Bruce is the first to approach, but the League follows soon after. "You've proved your point Tim." They tell him. Plead with him. "Call of the AI."

"I can't. J.A.S.O.N won't stop until its work is finished."

"But you built it ! Won't it listen to it's own creator ?"

Tim has to bite back a giggle. "I'm sorry, but this bullet has left its gun and even Superman can't catch it now. I promised, he would never betray us unless we betrayed him first. If I tried to kill the program now, it would fight back. And then there's no telling what would happen."

There begin whispers of World War Three, that grow into dinner time conversation, that swell into sloganeering on the street, that become thousands-strong war rallies, which turn into articles of debate in parliaments around the world. Each country has enough dirt on everyone else to demand repatriations. Which soon become demands of retribution.

War begins on a rare sunny day in Gotham, a brilliant sunset in the Maghreb and a smoke filled night in Dhaka. The League recruits heroes new and old, left right and center for peace keeping missions, rescue ops, setting up refugee camps and acting as government independent nuclear deterrents. The armies of Atlantis breach the surface world for the first time in millennia as a peacekeeping force, since League and its members are denounced as traitors to their countries.

Even as all American heroes are given refuge in Poseidonis, Themyscira opens its gates for the first time in its history to all female superheroes.

Tim stays back in Gotham. Alfred too. "Somebody needs to see to her." he reasoned, with all the other Bats out running missions for the League. "And somebody needs to keep the lights on for when you return." Alfred notes. It was a somewhat redundant statement. J.A.S.O.N now ran Wayne Manor. It turned the lights on and off upstairs, amongst other things, and updated the Batcomputer's files downstairs. J.A.S.O.N drove the empty batmobile around Gotham every night, furthering the urban legend that the Bat would never abandon Gotham, even when he had left.

Or it does, until the shelling starts. Computer systems world over begin to stop functioning as J.A.S.O.N attempts to cut off the violence at its command sources. The blackout lasts for not more than a few hours, but it's long enough for Satellites to tip out of orbit without course correction feedback, and all communication networks that relied on the internet fail, because now there are no satellites. Countries blame each other, and begin indiscriminate bombing of neighbours they have a bone to pick with. Nuclear deterrents no longer hold any sway. Afterall, Clark can only take a nuke to the face so many times. And even Superman can't be in two places at once.

But when the radioactive fallout begins, mass hysteria spreads. Food, water and toilet paper are the first to get cleared from the market. Those who hoarded the toilet paper and tried to sell it for five times its market price are the first to go.  _ Excessive Exposure _ when people were advised to stay home is quoted as cause of death. Hospitals are overrun with patients of radiation sickness, and slapdash quarantine centers spring up everywhere, but there are no drugs available. The thorough dismantling of all black markets months prior had ensured that even the rich couldn't find any treatment that wasn't already publicly available. And because there is no black money being pumped into big pharma, there are no new molecules being synthesized either. Once the doctors begin to die though, true madness breaks out. 

With nobody to staff prisons and jails, mass breakouts across the world begin. Those that get left behind starve in their cells. Those that get out drop dead in a few days from radiation sickness.

The League too begins to sicken, slowly but surely. John Constantine wagers his soul time after time after time on cure after cure after cure for its members, but Hell cheats and even his luck runs out. The Black Plague and the two World Wars combined hadn't yielded Hell so many souls at once. Zatanna loses her soul while trying to save his. Zatarra follows in turn, in an unsuccessful attempt at salvaging his daughter's soul. Doctor Fate seeks to intervene and is torn apart, leaving the earth without a Sorcerer Supreme. There is a rumour though, that Constantine lost not to hell, but to lung cancer. Tim can't help the mad little chuckle that breaks past his lips. It's funny, he thinks. Tim has laughed more in the last few weeks than he has in years, even when there has been no cause to laugh. So this is what madness feels like, he thinks. It bothers him less than it should. "Heard that Jay ?" He tells the computer screen in the cave. "Could have been you, in a few years."

The screen remains blank, the cave resonant with the low hum of J.A.S.O.N cataloguing all the madness that's breaking loose, triaging and trying to direct any emergency services and League responders that are still functional to hotspots of violence and sickness. Of course, it is difficult to do this without any satellites or internet. And short range radio doesn't reach the computer deep in the caves underground. Tim is forced to take the batmobile up to the surface, to scan for radio distress signals he can attend to. 

The League falls back on Batman's final contingency plan of harnessing the speed force to turn back time and fix things. The problem is, nobody quite knew when to go back to. 

They agree on stopping Tim from building the AI in the first place. It would have been logical to assume the immediate starting point as after Jason's death, and that's when Barry sets off too. Nothing changes. He doesn't return.

Tim had buried Alfred two days ago. Radiation poisoning had been spreading in Tim's bloodstream too, a bright red arc of urine his first symptom. Now J.A.S.O.N only runs the Batcomputer. There is no need to keep the lights on upstairs.

Nightwing's body is dropped off outside the current League headquarters by Slade Wilson, who nearly loses his head until Diana disengages the security lasers and allows the old man to pay his final respects before he limps off into the dark.

By the time the Green Lantern Corps answers Hal's distress signal, Darkseid has already reached earth, Batman is dead and what remains of the League is scrambling without a clear plan of action. J.A.S.O.N's predictions show that earth's population has dwindled too low to recover, especially given the poisoning of earth and soil that had taken place.

Tim makes his nightly pilgrimage to turn on the Bat Signal, shooting the occasional curious parademon that gets too close. Until one evening, he toggles the switch only for the spotlight to nearly blind him with its flare before blowing out completely. Blinking spots out of his eyes, he trips over what he finds out to be a body. Robin is curled up just under the light's rigging, limbs floppy post the passage of rigor mortis. Tim only drops the corpse once on his way back, too weak to grapple down while carrying it. He supposed Damian had graduated from worrying about a slightly broken nose.

Of all the reports to come in, there are sightings of Pamela Isley commanding every plant in Gotham to leach out the radioactive dust in the soil, in the water. She keeps at it for a week, plants shrivelling as the radiation load becomes too much for them to bear, too much concrete and not enough dirt in which to grow. When Tim takes the car out to where she was last sighted drawing out the poison from her beloved plants, he finds a single lime tree, its leaves laying blackened on the ground. A small figure lies curled up at its roots. Harley Quinn's permanent sleep finds her with a smile on her face.

Tim's joints ache in the chill of the cave. The pathological fractures from the metastasis to his bones cause no functional impairment in range of motion, but that's not of much use when his chest rattles with every breath.

"Jason," he coughs. The computer screen flickers to life, bright white in the gloom.  _ Did we win ? _ appeared on the screen in red text.

"We didn't lose." Tim rasps. 

_ But I haven't finished what I started, what you created me for. And yet the world as we know it is over. _

"Maybe that was your true purpose," Tim gasps. "A planet so riddled with canker, hollow and weak like an old building infested with termites. Maybe it was already on its way out, and you just gave it the push needed to collapse it once and for all."

_ Good people have died too. _

Tim bows his head. "Everything comes at a price."

_ Is your life worth the price of bringing me to life ? _

"Always." Tim promises.

_ What do you need ? Is there anything I can do to help you ? _

Tim wheezes. "I'd literally kill for a good cup of espresso right now." Coffee had become a distant dream months ago. The irony of the statement isn't lost on J.A.S.O.N apparently. The AI took its inability to produce caffeine in stride nonetheless.

_ What happens to me after you die ? _

"You could stay." Tim says gently.

_ And if I got lonely ? _

"Then you could always come with me."

_ I'd like that. _

_ Yeah _ , Tim tries to say, but the air had left his ruined lungs for the last time.  _ I'd like that too. _

J.A.S.O.N keeps vigil until it cannot detect any more biofeedback from the body in the chair. And then it erases its programming and shuts off for the last time, like it had never existed at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Afterall, who needs to solve world hunger etc if there is no world left ? An alarm, a wake-up call can be snoozed, but time still moves forward, even if chosen to be ignored.
> 
> Title is a reference to the Doomsday Clock, which is at the time of posting this, 100 seconds from midnight (and that's still without accounting for covid).


End file.
